"It's okay because I'm just driving": an exploration of self-reported mobile phone use among Mexican drivers

Abstract

Introduction: Technological advancements have the potential to enhance people's quality of life, but their misuse can have a detrimental impact on safety. A notable example is the escalating issue of distracted driving resulting from the use of mobile phones behind the wheel, leading to severe crashes and injuries. Despite these concerns, both drivers' usage patterns and their risk-related associations remain scarcely documented in Mexico. Therefore, this descriptive study aimed to examine the mobile phone usage of Mexican drivers, its relationships to risk awareness and near-miss/crash involvement, and the self-reported underlying reasons for this behavior.

Methods: This cross-sectional study utilized a sample of 1,353 licensed Mexican drivers who took part in a nationwide series of interviews regarding their onboard phone use settings.

Results: A significant percentage of drivers (96.8%) recognize using a mobile phone while driving as high-risk behavior. However, only 7.4% reported completely avoiding its use while driving, with 22.4% identified as high-frequency users. Frequency was also found positively associated with the self-reported rate of near-misses and crashes. Furthermore, qualitative data analysis highlights the emergence of a 'sense of urgency' to attend to phone-related tasks in response to daily demands and life dynamics, offering a potential explanation for this behavior.

Conclusion: The results of this study suggest common patterns of onboard mobile use among Mexican drivers concerning driving situations and associated risks. This underscores the need for increased efforts to discourage onboard phone use in the country.

Keywords: Cell phone; Driving; Habits; Road distractions; Texting.

Figure 1. Heat plot to assess the relationship between (self-reported) mobile use frequency and driving phone-enhanced crash record.

The heat plot shows a higher concentration of both near-misses and phone-enhanced crashes among drivers self-reporting a greater onboard phone usage. Bar/sector densities represent the magnitude of the associations presented in the figure, alternatively to the plot colors.

Figure 2. Self-reported frequency of mobile phone feature use, organized from the most frequent (map browsing) to the least frequently reported (writing emails).

This plot shows how activities such as map browsing, reading messages (passive), and texting (active) remain the most commonly performed onboard mobile phone-related behaviors among Mexican drivers.

Figure 3. Usage (yes/no) of different mobile phone features in four common road settings.

Note: Frequencies were retrieved only among drivers having previously stated to perform the behavior. Among the four driving situations or scenarios presented to participants, the most frequent for all the onboard phone-related tasks was while stopping at a traffic light. Accessibility note: The identification of the colors is not necessary to understand the content of the figure.

Figure 4. Self-reported reasons for mobile phone use while driving among Mexican drivers.

Bigger words represent categories cited with a greater frequency. Among all the reasons attributed to using the mobile phone while driving, there stands out the perception of needing to attend it, a growing inclusion of mobile phone in daily-life dynamics, and a so-called “sense of urgency” raised among onboard phone-using drivers. The size of the words corresponds to their frequency in the participants’ speech (i.e., the larger the word size, the greater the number of times that it has been cited).